"Black and White" - THE STORY WITH NO BACKGROUND

Salteñas - a very popular Bolivian snack

The idea for the story/poem "Black and White" began germinating in early-2023 when we were still living in Costa Rica, but only about a month before we began our nomadic journey through South America.

Once I started this story, it flowed very easily. I wanted to create a juxtaposition between this kid who was somewhere on the spectrum and an older, bitter man. I wanted to make them, in some respects, as completely opposite as I possibly could and in other respects, very similar. The kid could not see colors and the old man had been a painter in vivid colors. Neither of them had any friends and neither of them could relate well to others. Yet, they somehow found a way to connect with each other.

There is absolutely nothing in my personal history that sparked this story, these characters, their experiences or their idiosyncrasies. I have known a few people with Asperger's Syndrome and others somewhere on the spectrum, but none of them served as the basis for the boy. I have also known some sour old men, hopefully I am not yet one of them, but none of them formed the model for the old man.

I would have to say that this is one of those story ideas that simply fell out of the sky. I truly believe, at least for me, that if I can just open up my "airwaves", especially at night when nothing else is going on, something is going to pop into my head. This is true for me more so when there are no other important thoughts or issues rattling around in my brain.

I still cannot say absolutely whether writing a short story or a poem is easier for me. It just depends. In some respects, writing a short story is easier, because as a writer you have absolutely no constraints. You can take it in any direction that you want to take it. You can include dialogue or no dialogue. You can ramble on a bit without having to force a concept into some sort of rhyme scheme.

On the other hand, I am working on a poem right now, actually the lyrics for a song, which started out slowly but has come together very quickly. I wrote the guts of it in less than three days. The poem/song is presently entitled "The Blue Dawn Bar" and hopefully I will be able to entice one of my musically-talented friends to write music for it and turn it into a song.